Keith Hospital in the upper south-east of South Australia will no longer accept public patients for its acute care beds.

Private patients will still be admitted, but any public patients will be charged $400 for acute care.

CEO Bill Hender said the board understood some people might not be able to afford the fee, but the board had no other choice.

"The hospital board has not taken this decision lightly," he said.

"It's been forced on it by the withdrawal of funding by the State Government.

"However we do have private acute care beds which are still operational at the moment and we will continue to take private patients and of course both private and public patients are always welcome at our medical centre, through accident and emergency and in our aged care facility."

Families affected

Opposition health spokesman Martin Hamilton-Smith said those who could not afford the charge faced travelling long distances.

"They'll have to travel as far as Murray Bridge or Naracoorte to access a publicly-funded acute bed and that's very, very difficult if you're a loved one or you're a next of kin, your wife or your husband is in hospital, you have a child in hospital and you're running a farm or a business," he said.

"[It] makes life unbearable for families in distress when a loved one is in hospital."

SA Health Minister John Hill predicted few people would be affected and said public beds were available half an hour away at Bordertown.

"That's one of the reasons our funding wasn't continued, because we were funding three hospital beds for public patients and only one of them was being used, so effectively we were subsidising private patients in the hospital at a time when public funding for hospitals is stretched and we're under pressure from the Liberal Party, as from everywhere else, to reduce the amount of money we're spending on health," he said.

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